Contents

Overview

The hand-written C files in the Gambit lib/ directory contain many small functions, so it would be useful to have a list. The GNU etags program can create lists in a format that Emacs can use and in a different format that vi and Vim can use. These lists support interactive browsing within Emacs, vi, and Vim. With your cursor on a symbol, you jump to its definition. Unfortunately the lsits are not very useful to read by themselves (to get a quick overview of functions and the order they are defined in, or to get sublists of symbols sorted by type).

Another program, Exuberant Ctags, has some features etags doesn't, but I haven't gotten Exuberant working yet.

I don't think the original UNIX ctags is flexible enough to parse the Gambit library. I haven't tried yet.

There is no point in parsing C files that were compiled from Scheme, if I can parse the original Scheme.

The extensive use of preprocessor macros in the library code means etags's default parser can do very little with the files. Luckily you can extend the lines recognized by etags through its --regex option. The regular expressions used must:

Match the entire text of a line or group of lines (this is not documented in the etags manual page).

Contain a subexpression that matches the name of the function being defined.

Handle enough C syntax to match all and only the correct uses of the macros.

etags doesn't tag forward declarations, so these expressions are designed not to match forward declarations.

You can't give etags an expression and say "treat matches as new return types" or "treat new matches as function signatures". Your expression must match everything needed to find any function definition -- return type, linkage, function name, signature, and opening brace. However, etags does not need to know where those parts are within the matched text, except the function name as described above.

Because the regular expressions may match more than one line, a recent version of etags is required. Earlier versions don't allow multiline matches. The version distributed with Emacs 22.1 works, the version distributed with Emacs 21.4a doesn't work.

Parsing ___P

The ___P macro takes two arguments, each of which usually contains parentheses. No regular expression can match text containing parentheses nested to an unknown depth. Howver, if you have a known depth, you can create a regular expression that matches text containing parentheses nested to that depth or less. As the known depth gets bigger, the expressions get longer, so it's wise to use the lowest depth that will work.

Finding the maximum depth of parentheses used

The maximum depth after any ___P invocation in any of the library files is four. See this page for the script used to find that.